I just stum­bled upon Andy Budd’s Travel Pho­tog­ra­phy web­site, and it’s incred­i­ble, both in terms of pre­sen­ta­tion and photography/content itself.

Next time I’ve got a free hour or four some­where with a Flash install (Steve?), I want to see if I can fig­ure out a way to auto­mate the cool pre­sen­ta­tion style he’s got hap­pen­ing over there, using Flash/ActionScript or some­thing… of course, my pho­tog­ra­phy is garbage com­pared to his work, but hey! I’m hop­ing some­thing will crop up so that I can jus­tify spend­ing time on such a project… I can think of a few imme­di­ate appli­ca­tions off the top of my head, but it’s pretty unnec­es­sary, if very cool. We shall see.

On a standards-related aside, the folks over at Web Stan­dards Group have been claw­ing at each oth­ers throats for the last few days, regard­ing the best way to imple­ment Flash in a stan­dards com­pli­ant man­ner with XHTML. Umm. Okay, what­ever. The answer, as best as I’ve under­stood it, is sim­ply to revert to HTML 4.01, or just to get over it. I throughly agree with David McKinnon’s response on the issue, which I’ve repro­duced in part here:

This may sound like heresy in this list, but the goal of using Web stan­dards
is not to get your site to val­i­date. (Wait, put down that pitch­fork!) The
way I see it peo­ple, is that it’s all about peo­ple. The goal is to make it
bet­ter for peo­ple. Bet­ter for view­ers, who don’t get things look­ing like
krud because they choose the ‘wrong’ browser or plat­form. Bet­ter for peo­ple
with spe­cial needs. Bet­ter for peo­ple who build and main­tain the site and
bet­ter for the peo­ple who will redesign the site when it comes to that.
Then, when the forces of good rise up to crush the forces of tyranny all
peo­ple will live in…

Er… sorry, got a bit car­ried away there…
Any­way it may just be bet­ter to use the flash default code because it works
even if it doesn’t validate.

Amen.

Tags: ActionScript, Andy Budd, David McKinnon, HTML, Web Standards Group